Last night I finished reading Mary Gaitskill's Because They Wanted to, at long last. I've been working through it for a few weeks, stealing chances to read now and then. I enjoyed it about as much as I enjoyed Don't Cry, which was a lot.

Gaitskill's narrators tend to have a detached objectivity, which I think would normally turn me off because it gets "cold" and "robotic" if overdone, but she tempers it with gorgeous descriptions and unique, unlikely metaphors and similes. I'll never forget how in "College Town" in Don't Cry, she described one character as having the "face of a greyhound," which I thought was simple and brilliant.

On the one hand then, in Gaitskill's work you get the very sort of high-intellect descriptors mixed with very reflex-oriented, gutteral metaphor. While the body and the mind don't necessarily coexist in her fiction, they share the burden of the story telling. It's an interesting give-and-take.

A lot of the stories are about intimate relationships. Gaitskill's objectivity, when applied to sex and sexuality, is somewhat uncanny, but it also feels very honest and true to me in a way that doesn't at all glorify or memorialize the sex act in any way. There's no sentimentality in her work. That's what I'm trying to say. But it is emotional. The emotional effect of her work is cumulative, and many of the stories are burdened by lonesomeness, by characters who are, like their narration, almost fully detached from the world itself, held on by the thread that tethers them to the story (which sometimes breaks off at the end, letting them drift off into nothingness).

Of all the prose writers I've been writing, I think it's she who I admire most. The craft of her language is, to me, exquisite and interesting and challenging in a lot of ways, but always true.

3.01.2010

Over the weekend, I went to see Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. I actually went to see The Young Victoria, but for some reason the 7:05 showing was sold out 45 minutes in advance in Bethesda. Only in Bethesda are people clamoring to see a two-month-old movie during the dinner hour, I guess.

Plan B was Percy. The title, to me, sounds like a great band name and first album title. ("Climbing up the charts this week are Percy Jackson and the Olympians with their debut release The Lightning Thief.") I was very turned off by the fact that this was a Chris Columbus film, but in the end, the combination of my curiosity about why Catherine Keener decided to make this movie and my preemptive excitement for the new Clash of the Titans won out. As did my companion's reluctance to see anything remotely suspenseful.

The movie was actually full of famous people: Pierce Brosnan, Uma Thurman, Rosario Dawson, Joe Pantoliano, the hot English dude who was on Journeyman and who's on Gray's Anatomy now, the weird looking English dude with the bad hair, and the menacingly sexy English dude who always plays German terrorists.

Dawson was, like, the best Persephone ever.

The lead kid is cute, and he has really pretty blue eyes, so when he's brooding about everything going on, it works. The daughter of Athena was pretty good, but kind of wooden at times. And the story was fun. It was almost a little too major for a full-on kids' movie, but is comparable to some of the later Potter films in terms of its darkness factor.

Sequel? Likely. Is this based on a series of books? It felt that way. Now that the public's appetite for kids' movie series has been whetted by Potter, I'd expect this is a move to cash in and keep us hungry.